Not Enough And Never Too Much

The last time I experienced anxiety was around two o'clock this afternoon when Cormac Gallagher asked me to formulate the closing remarks of this Second Annual Congress of the Association for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland (APPI). At that particular moment, I was suddenly- confronted with the mysterious desire of the Other. However, the first question I asked myself was not 'What is going to happen next?', but rather 'what have I done to deserve this?’ A possible answer to this question suggested itself, along the lines that I had come quite a long way to attend this congress, after having met and heard some Irish people at a conference in Belgium, after having read some excellent pieces in an Irish Lacanian journal and after having been stimulated by the strong working alliance between the Department of Psychoanalysis of Ghent University on the one hand and what I dare to call the psychoanalytic circle of Dublin on the other hand.…